These creatures evolved from spiders during The Mana Wars after prolonged exposure to the mana and share some familiar traits. They have eight strong hind legs, four on each side of the torso. Each leg has three black claws on the end, made of pure bone, and a small sucker pad that helps the creatures grip to walls and trees. They have a black exoskeleton with a large carapace over its back providing excellent protection from hunters. Their skin is sinewy and stretches over the body underneath the exoskeleton with small patches of fur for protection against the elements. As the creatures age black pigmentation spreads over their bodies.
The head is separated from the torso by a short muscled neck that gives them limited articulation. A single, unblinking eye rests above a strange mouth, that cannot close and constantly secreting saliva. The mouth has no teeth, with the tongue being hollow to suck up fluids. It is protected by four large black tusks.
When hunting it uses its two front legs that have black pincers to trap and disable their prey. Although having no visible nose or ears they have acute sensory perception and hunt through sound and smell. The tentalac cannot take in food through its ‘mouth’; instead on its underbelly it has a thin layer of bile soaked skin can retracts revealing a set of six small tentacles (four in the younger tentalac). The tentacles latch onto the prey, drawing it towards the body and the skin folds back encompassing the object. The tentacles then release a viscous corrosive substance that dissolves the object and absorbs the leftovers. Digestion of its victim takes little over an hour.
The tentalac live within a hive system. A queen, much larger than the rest, rules over a single hive that can consist of up to fifty tentalac. A queen can lay up to ten eggs in a single cycle but is only likely to produce five other queens in its life-time. There are workers that take care of the nest and their queen while up to twenty tentalac are hunters that collect food for the rest of the nest.
There are two known species of tentalac: Blizzard Tentalac, these inhabit the deep caverns of the Tesseras Glacier and have white skin to camouflage themselves in the snow. The second is the Fael Tentalac, these have been sighted occasionally in the dense forests separating the lush plains from the mountainous regions in the north. They have green skin with moss and weeds growing on the carapace.
